Over 700 scientists, engineers, businesspeople, and technologists for this year’s Singularity Summit - the world's leading conference on emerging technologies. The event will be held October 15th &16th at the 92nd Street Y in New York City.

The Summit will explore "big picture" questions such as the direction of the global economy, philosophy of mind, and the ethics of technological development. Twenty-five speakers will present, including two professors of robotics, financial experts, a co-founder of Skype, a pioneer in regenerative medicine, scientists from the MIT Media Lab, a longevity expert, economist Tyler Cowen, cosmologist Max Tegmark, neuroscientist Christof Koch, and venture capitalist Peter Thiel.

The recent victory of IBM's Watson supercomputer on the game show Jeopardy! will be the central theme of discussion, with a keynote by Jeopardy contestant and 74-time winner Ken Jennings.

Jennings surprised audiences around the world in 2004 when he won 74 continuous Jeopardy! matches, winning over $2,500,000 on a six-month streak. In February, Jennings went up against Watson in on a special exhibition match of Jeopardy!, and lost. In his keynote at Singularity Summit, Jennings will recount his experience on Jeopardy! and what it felt like to lose to a machine on the game show he otherwise dominated.

Ray Kurzweil, futurist and inventor, and Stephen Wolfram, a leading figure in the field of artificial intelligence, will be speaking on the implications of the Watson victory. Dan Cerutti, who manages the commercialization of Watson at IBM, will speak on applying Watson to fields besides Jeopardy!, such as medicine.